Is it fair to say that an escalation of a change request or an incident goes up the management chain or to secondary support groups and that a notification is a message/update back to the customer or the business unit ?

1) Functional Escalations - these are where incidents are moved from 'function' (work group, organisation unit, etc) in the organisation to another.

2) Hierarchical Escalations - where higher levels of 'authority' are called in to resolve a priority conflict, find additional resources, etc.

Escaltions mostly are formalised in Incident Management - but depending on how you structure your work environment may apply in other process, such as problem management.

The 'escalation', as such, isn't the action taken, but a specific sub-process built formally into your processes. An escalation may result in many different types of action, and in many cases a pre-defined notification may be the action, or one of a group of actions.

For example - say you have an SLA to resolve a desktop-failure within four hours of logging the report. (Resolve here may mean putting a substitute in place and configuring the users profile - while the bung box goes out to repair, or a new one is ordered). Your process may specify that if no-one begins work on the incident within 1 hour the priority of the incident record may be increased, and a team leader notified that no one is looking at it. This would be a 'hierarchical' escalation. But the escalation may include the requirement that the team leader either find someone to begin work, or call the client to alert them to delays and a possible breach of the SLA. These actions are still a part of the 'escalation'.

In another case your process may specify that for a network connectivity failure the Service Desk will run a set of tests, and if these don't indicate a situation that can be remedied there, then the incident report is routed to a desktop support technician, who will go on site to do more detailed diagnostics. This is a 'functional' escalation. Of course a notification might also be sent to the technician receiving the assignment - but the term 'escalation' refers to the whole shebang: The event that triggers the action and all the actions required.

So a notification is one of the many actions that may (or may not) take place in an escalation.